Great news. Monday I am moving my parents into shared rooms – and most importantly, a shared bed – at a board and care close to my home. To that end, I’ve been busy with electronic paperwork and facilitating the transfer of my mother from skilled nursing stroke rehab and my father from assisted living memory care. Delegated the moving of queen size bed and my parents’ clothing to my husband. Sunday we move the bed and clothes, and I sign the papers and cut the check.
This change, which I expect to be wonderful – which I hope to be wonderful for both my parents and my own family – still is anxiety provoking. So much is riding on it. I pray my parents are happy with the set-up.
Anyway, I’ve been so stressed out that I’ve colored a crap load of images using Colorfy in the last few days. Take a look at the slide show of images and see how busy I’ve been.
Today I finally took a clonazepam hoping it would help. Nada. No difference. I feel like I’m about ready to jump out of my skin. Instead, I write and share with you how moving someone else affects me.
You can imagine how hard it might be to move myself, son and husband. Whenever I have moved in the last ten years, and we’ve moved numerous times, I’ve had a set-back, experiencing deep and sometimes debilitating depression.
We moved our son five times during elementary school. He, too, is sensitive to change. My childhood growing up, we constantly moved. Because of it, I tend to hold people at arms length, never getting too attached for I may be leaving soon.
Change is Anxiety Provoking
Comments
33 responses to “Change is Anxiety Provoking”
-
Thank you!
-
Any move, whether your own or someone else, is incredibly stressful. I admire the way in which you’ve handled everything. And your colourings are beautiful – my favourite is the blue one
-
Thank you!
-
I wish you the best as you climb out of your depression.
-
That’s what I did recently, for sure. I like to think I’m coming back out of it now.
-
Thank you, Leslie!
-
Good luck Kitt. I’m thinking of you and your parents.
-
You are so welcome, my dear one!
-
Thank you, Indah. You’ve been busy with your own life changes. Moving from one continent to another! Hope you are enjoying Minnesota – quite different than both the Netherlands and Indonesia.
-
Thank you so much Dyane’s mom! Great information. Hopeful, too.
-
I hope so. My father keeps talking about wanting to go back to his home. Since my mom had a stroke, we say that we’re taking her recovery one day at a time.
-
I have been missing some news about you. Moving is indeed draining our energy and emotion 🙁
Wishing you the best for your parents and you are so kind to take care of them. My thoughts are with you, Kitt xoxo -
Here goes, a little bit of perspective for you from my mom who’s a retired a speech pathologist/CCC/SLP. She worked for the LAUSD (Los Angeles United School District) for many years, and wrote:
” There are many things to consider. There’s a period involved for about six months which we call ‘spontaneous’ generation where it’s important for a professional to work with the patient to regain whatever language has been affected.
Often short term memory is affected first. If one’s family member starts to do amateur therapy and exercises, it can actually be confusing and too stressful to the brain. My friend had a stroke and her husband gave her homemade exercises which actually impeded her progress.
Speech is centered in an area called called ‘Broca’s’, and as you know, strokes range from TIAs to mild to moderate to severe. Receiving good professional therapy as soon as possible, which fortunately you obtained for your mother, is so important, but the brain needs to rest after the stroke as well. Some self healing occurs naturally.
Many areas of language may be affected such as memory, word retrieval, receptive and expressive language, etc. A complicated matter. But you can be reassured that many people recover quite well after a stroke. My cousin Jerry, a physician, is doing very well at 84 after he had a stroke. Once he recovered, he went to London to speak at a worldwide seminar, and now he is back at work part-time at Boston Massachusetts.
I hope this information has been of help.” -
I am so glad that you are finally able to reunite your parents. And, mostly, that you are able to do it without uprooting your own family. There is something to be said for having them close. My parents are looking to move my grandmother closer to them because it’s an hour and a half round trip drive.
Hopefully, having your parents together will help each of them. -
Thanks!
-
I started my son at age four.
-
Yep. I often fall into a depression.
-
you are doing a great job. soon you will be able to look back on this and say, “I survived”. Woof!
-
Indeed. Starting therapy at 18 gave you a jumpstart on most of us (except my son, who started therapy at age three, and 27 years later is still angry)
-
I hope your folks like the new setup. I find change very hard, too — especially moving. I always have a set back after a move.
-
I will today!
-
I look forward to your mom’s expertise. Honestly, you could post it as a comment, for others may find it helpful.
-
Thank you, Vic!
-
So glad you have settled into a home, especially as Tom struggles with his illness. Stability helps.
-
I was very angry at my parents throughout my twenties. Compassion came as I entered my thirties. Once I, too, became a mother, my compassion for my parents increased significantly. It has been a process. It helped that I started therapy at 18, and that at thirty I started taking medication. Being a therapist working with both severely dysfunctional families and adoptive families who clearly loved their severely emotionally disturbed adolescents helped, too, for the compassion I had for them transferred to my own parents. I’m 52 now, so my path has been a long one.
-
Thank you!
-
I can’t imagine the stress of doing something like this. I’m so glad you have the coloring exercise as an activity to help you, although I know it’s not a cure-all for this degree of change-induced anxiety!
I got a long text from my Mom (meant for you) with some general thoughts re: speech therapy for strokes – nothing too overwhelming – I’ll send it your way.
GOOD LUCK today and tomorrow – you’ll be in my thoughts constantly!
Love you very much, Kitt -
I am glad that you are finally able to get your parents together, I know that was a major source of anxiety for you. Good things happen to good people, you and your family are proof of that.
-
I so hope this works for you, your husband and son and for your parents. Yes, moving has so many different strings of emotion and it seems they are all pulled in one way or another. I understand about not letting people get close because you know you will be moving on. Tom and I are amazed that we are into our 11th year at this address and have no plans to move. Take in as much air as you need and make time for coloring – it does wonders for the stress.
-
Yay for bringing your parents back together! I wonder what it will be like for them, since there has been so much time and change in between?
It’s nothing short of cosmic that you write about moving, in your own life and your son’s, and how it’s affected you both. You may have read my post about my son inviting me to thanksgiving and then throwing me out?
I wrote him an email expressing how incredibly painful and humiliating that was, and what I didn’t tell him was that as I left I thought, well, that’s one more person I can’t count on when I need help, and one less person I have to worry about when I die.
His response was a laundry list of everything I have done to upset his life, including moving several times, including my choosing a mobile lifestyle, my dog, shit, I guess those two years in therapeutic boarding school and years of family therapy did nothing. I could have saved my money. I’m not the mother he thought he signed up for, apparently.
Lesson learned but not yet internalized: don’t let the people in your life guilt trip you. You have done the best you can, with the resources available to you at the time. Of course we kill ourselves trying to meet our family’s needs. But if that’s not good enough, it’s not for us to beat ourselves up about. It’s for them to deal.
Of course your elderly and ill parents can’t do anything about their situation. But at some point, good enough is going to have to come into play. Put that oxygen mask on and breathe normally. -
I’m so glad you found a good situation for your parents! What a relief it must be, even though the act of moving itself is a brass-plated b***h. I hope all goes well. Thinking of you.
-
Thank you, Jen. It may be about time to just go join my husband and watch TV.
-
I am so glad that you can write out your thoughts and feelings so freely it takes guts to write about what you’re feeling about a certain situation and then blog about it. You have my vote in doing this. I hope your anxiety calms down a bit, I have used many different techniques for that myself, such as grounding, checking things out with other people, and leaving the situation for a bit to get myself back to feeling better. I also enjoy reading about your parents’ as I have older parents as well and they are still living in their home but have many difficulties.
Leave a Reply